We are either schizophrenic towards God or God is bipolar towards us. As we believe who He is, in fact almost all of us are acting schizophrenic towards God.
For the simple danger of reading the Bible without understanding what “era” we are in – dispensation for theologians. Many live on the seesaw in knowing who God is, because they believe in the son of God but not that he is THE son of God – just like God.
Why? Because in the Old Testament God loved, hated, got angry, took revenge, punished, fought, hated, despised and helped. And Jesus came along saying, “I and the Father are one; whoever has seen me has seen the Father; no one has seen the Father except the one who revealed them in Jesus. But now God feels hunger, cries, is tempted, feels betrayed, misses, feels abandoned, and even God is killed, hanged on a tree, God becomes human.
Then, the vast majority of Christians live in this limbo without knowing who God is, and God becomes a “god” who is according to his mood, or according to our needs.
If he is a very conscious sinner, he will have faith in Grace, abandoning faith in God, because he thinks that grace is an umbrella against cynicism. Or, if he is a “sanctified” type – the legalist, moralist who does not sin for lack of opportunity or fear (most of the time), God is the God of law and vengeance, and who destroys those who are not like him – “Lord, I thank you that I am not like this tax collector.”
They remain in this limbo, on these skates where the foot goes according to the needs of life, transforming God into a “little god” of give and take, transforming God into who we are, although the Gospel transforms me into who God is!
That is why today, our pulpits are almost in chaos, today's sermons are all bipolar if compared, one comes and says it is Grace, another says it is Law, another says it is grace in the law, another says Law with Grace – then it becomes a disgrace.
There are no standards for Christians. This is tragic and does more harm than the devil, because it is done in the name of God. Not to mention that 80% of the sermons are based on the Old Testament, presenting a God who is merely operational.
The question is: Who is God, how does God relate to me? How does God act in us?
Simple. Either you truly believe that Jesus is God, or you are wasting your time. Which leads me to believe that many cannot faithfully believe this, because the fruits presented as words, thoughts and works almost always do not match God incarnate.
90% believes that Jesus is God – God of religion. Not God beyond time, of creation.
Therefore, if I want to know who God is, what God is like – I read what is written about Jesus, by the living witness of his words. Jesus did not stop being God because he became human, on the contrary. It is by becoming human that we become divine. This is Jesus’ deep desire, stated in the Gospels, that we become more and more human, always, and that is why God became human, and as Leonardo Boff says: “Human the way he was, he could only be God.”
We run serious risks if we continue to see the Old Testament as the only expression and character of God for us as a historical testimony. For there is a huge gulf between the God presented by kings and prophets and the incarnate Word, (from the relational point of view – and not in prophecies that were fulfilled in Him). I believe with all my heart, and I confess all my faith in Jesus, Lord and God, and that my only way of knowing what God is like, is by deeply knowing the gospels that present Jesus, who in history was the Christ, and in Paul's letters the churches that present the Christ, who in history was Jesus.
In the Old Testament, God was operational. God presented himself to a people with minimal civilization, where “gods” existed. In Jesus, He presents himself as the relational God, the God who relates. In the Old Testament, God sent bread; in Jesus, He is the bread. In the ancestor, God gushed water from the rock. In Jesus, He is the source of living water that came down from heaven.
In the ancestors, God was something to be operated on, on the outside, by rules, by a manual. In Jesus, God is to be experienced, vivid, eaten and drunk, God who lives in the heart.
Don't waste time with boastful sermons that only massage our ego, don't be fooled, experience God and live the Gospel.
“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us in his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds: Who being the brightness of his glory, and the exact representation of his substance Of Him (God) and upholding all things by the word [hallelujah…] of His (the Son’s) power, having by Himself purged our sins, [hallelujah…] sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.” {Holy Spirit to the Hebrews.}
Fabiano Moreno